Works in progress

Wow, it has been quite a busy January for me. I've decided to run a few children's art and creative writing workshops at our local library and community hall in the Easter holidays so my time has mostly been taken up by planning the courses. That's not even half the work done yet, as now that I've booked dates and venues, I need to promote the workshops and get people to sign up.

Fortunately, our local librarians are very helpful and have agreed to let me put up a poster and digital ads in the library. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I'll be able to drum up enough interest in the workshops and that this will all be a fun experience for me and the participants. I'll be posting information on the workshops as a separate page on this blog. Just keep your eyes peeled!

Anyway, I've now made some of my paintings available on Society6 as prints, canvasses, iPhone cases and skins and throw pillows. Just click on the icon on this blog's sidebar to get to my shop. The shipping charges to the UK are a bit high, but I'm really tempted to buy my own throw pillows! This one from my acrylic painting, Waiting, is my favourite:

It looks so bright and cheerful that I just want to have it on my sofa right now.

Here's a glimpse of something I'm working on. I'm almost done with this. I just need to work on the little flowers. I'm really pleased with how this has turned out as it actually began as just an experiment with glazes. I was thinking of using an acrylic retarder to make my colours translucent, but ended up just using water to dilute my paints.

Now this is my main painting project. This is a commission for a little boy's room. He wants a space theme for his room, so this painting will be filled with stars, planets and maybe even an alien. This is what it looked like after I put down the background washes. I managed to paint the background stars yesterday. The unpainted lower part of the canvas will have some very interesting objects. So far, I'm happy with this. It's quite a huge painting for me as the canvas is two square feet, but that hasn't been a problem at all. I'll post a photo of the finished painting once I've delivered it.

Oh, and in other news, Lucas and I managed to finish our sketchbook just before the deadline. Yay! Here's my favourite page from our sketchbook:

We definitely enjoyed working together on our sketches. I'll post a link here when our sketchbook gets digitized over at The Sketchbook Project.


I'm also hoping to find time to sit down and do some fiction writing. I have pages of half-finished stories languishing in my hard drive. :( I'm not sure how I'll get to work on them, but I will keep trying. My friend E and I are hatching up a plan for a book or a series of books that will encourage bilingualism. Here's a quick illustration I made for the characters we have in mind:

So yes, spring will definitely be a busy season for me. What are your plans for the next few months?